Provide means of coping
The counseling audiologist cannot solve the family’s problems surrounding the hearing impairment of the child but can provide the family the necessary guidelines it needs to cope. We believe that the counselor’s prime task is to help the parents become as fully aware as possible of their own personal attitudes, beliefs, needs, and expectations before they can be in a position to help their child. They need to see themselves not as taking the hearing loss personally but viewing it essentially as belonging to the child. In this way they are better able to objectify the child’s problem, gather a clear perspective of what they can do, and follow through with whatever educational and habilitative strategies are necessary.
This is no easy duty, because parents tend to want to assimilate their children’s problems, the process of which, in our view, is likely a projection of their own unresolved feelings of guilt, resentment, and need for a perfect child and an absence of conflict. The counselor may find considerable resistance to exploring these aspects of parent-child relationships and must temper empathic understanding with gentle persuasion if parents are to change their firmly entrenched belief system. A judgmental know-it-all or condescending approach would be detrimental not only to the therapeutic process but to the eventual educational and habilitative outcome. However, if we, as counselors, can be conscious of these occasional professional slips in ourselves, then we are unlikely to do any irreparable harm.
Parents who are helped to relate to their hearing-impaired children in the way we are suggesting can better aid in developing the emotional and intellectual resources naturally available to children and thus ensure the most positive results.
Another task particularly important foe the counselor is to be certain that the family knows exactly how to follow through with its own responsibilities toward the child and with the various other professional resources available. It is one thing to recommend that a hearing aid be fitted and another thing to make certain that it is appropriately used by the child. If recurring ear infections are the problem, the counseling audiologist may need to make certain that the child is checked out ontologically.
We do not suggest that the audiologist a lone should be the prime caregiving coordinator. Others, like otologist, the speech-language pathologist, and the teacher, also might play a guiding role in helping the parents follow through with their responsibilities.
One of the most revealing results of the study by Sweetow and Barrager (1980) are the major concerns of the parents. When they were asked, “In general how would you like to see the role of the audiologist expanded or improved?” the three most common answers were
1. The audiologist should handle the hearing aids.
2. The audiologist should work more closely with the schools.
3. More information on educational programs and emotional support should be provided.
From our perspective, the chief concern is that parents also know exactly where to go for assistance, know what to do, and do it. As professional caregiviers, we must demand no less from ourselves. There is little question, too, of the effect of parental presence or absence on the psychosocial, linguistic and academic outcomes of deaf and hearing-impaired children. Calderon and Low (1998) found that children whose fathers were present had significantly better academic and language outcomes than those with no father present.